What Plays? What Doesn't?

I had my regular Joe Franklin Comedy, Monkeys In The Atrium Stand-Up gig on Saturday night. It was another young crowd, but a fair number of middle-aged folks, too.

It was also another "joke-to-joke" audience. These audiences are engaged, having a good time, but not raucous. They decide for each joke, one at a time, whether they like it or not. {A} jokes get laughs. {B} jokes get a few muted chuckles. And {C} jokes get coughs.

I'm starting to develop a feel for what an audience will go for, just by looking at their faces and watching other comics play. This is one of the little light bulbs that has come on for me recently. Dimly and flickering at first, but it's a start.

For example, at this show I thought, "technology jokes and dick jokes will play well with this crowd and my Utah jokes won't." I was right.

So I decided to keep the Utah jokes to short versions, four quick bits to set up who I am and then move on after about 2 minutes. I was doing the Utah jokes, and they were doing fairly to poorly. I was thinking, "can't wait to get to the stuff they'll like." But then something weird happened. All sudden I found myself doing long versions of the jokes and then doing bits I hadn't even planned to do.

What the fuck?

I remember thinking on stage, what am I doing? Why are these words coming out of my mouth? What's worse, I wasn't talking to them. I was talking at them. I dug myself a nice little hole so that when I finally got to the computer jokes, it took me about a minute to dig myself back out. After that, the rest of the set, the majority of the set, was fine. "Passwords" and "Gay is Trendy" killed.

I got off stage and racked my brains. Why did I do more of the material that wasn't working instead of less?!?!

Then it finally hit me.

I was scared of the bit that was supposed to come after the Utah bits and before the computer bit ... my ex-boyfriend jokes. These jokes cast me as a fairly crass character. It's a rather risky bit and I've never done it at Joe Franklin. It's killed a few times. And it has bombed as badly as I've ever bombed twice. I could see they were pretty sure they didn't like me. And I was sub-consciously afraid that the ex-boyfriend jokes would finally push them over the edge.

I ended up not doing them, the right decision. But instead of just moving on to something I thought would work, I stalled by doing more Utah jokes.

This is a case of my "always have a set list" work ethic backfiring. I'm going to start being more casual about my set list. I plan to continue to have one, but I plan to be more flexible.

I'm also thinking about putting together a set with no Utah jokes at all and wondering how I would introduce myself if I don't do the Utah stuff. I'm not entirely sure if this is a good idea or not.

Now, this analysis aside, the show was fine. The show producer was pleased, as always, to have me in there. Many audience members went out of their way to shake my hand, thank me and compliment me on the way out. So I'm the only one who knows about my silly little set list blues.

I continue to struggle with not being too hard on myself.

A dear friend said to me at dinner tonite, "stop trying to be perfect."

Good advice.